Tuition challenge

Wednesday

Gov. Rick Scott this week challenged Florida’s state colleges to offer four-year degrees that cost no more than $10,000 to obtain.

Consider it the “value menu” concept of higher education. For those who can’t afford a Big Mac, they can select a dollar cheeseburger.

Of course, fast-food restaurants offer that discounted fare because they can afford to produce it that cheaply, or sell it at a loss while making up the difference on the higher-end items. It remains to be seen if colleges can do the same with certain — or any — fields of study.

Scott’s vision isn’t unique. He got the idea from his buddy, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who in 2011 issued the same $10,000 challenge to Lone Star colleges. Scott, like Perry, is seeking a cheaper alternative to the skyrocketing tuition costs at four-year universities (although Florida’s tuitions are among the lowest in the nation). That has priced a college degree beyond the means of many Americans — or forced students to take on years of crushing debt in the form of loans to pay for it.

Wishing for affordable degrees is not the same as making it so. We want chocolate cake to taste great and have fewer calories, too.

So is it doable? Several education officials believe so and have agreed to pursue Scott’s challenge. The mean tuition and fees for a four-year degree at Florida’s 28 state colleges is $13,300 (it’s almost double that at the state’s universities), so they have some trimming to do. Gulf Coast State College says it already offers a four-year degree with a base tuition of $9,620, not counting fees.

In Texas, schools have experimented in different ways to meet Perry’s goal. Some colleges have designed a five-year general degree that combines high school, community college and four-year university credits. One institution combined three separate minors into one bachelor’s degree for an overall cost of $9,974, aiming at the market of adults who are seeking to broaden their skills in order to advance their careers, not necessarily recent high school graduates.

However admirable the goal, skepticism is warranted. For instance, what makes 10 grand the threshold for an affordable, marketable college education? That seems like an artificial price point more attuned to political whims than economics. It strikes us as similar to Florida government’s insistence on making property insurance “affordable,” regardless of the actual costs of insuring high-risk properties.

The consumer may pay less, but the actual costs don’t decline. Those would get shifted somewhere else.

Furthermore, the degrees that Scott values the most, such as in science and technology, typically cost more to administer because of lab and equipment expenses. How many degrees that meet his $10,000 price point will offer the kind of job marketability that he has demanded?

Perhaps Scott’s challenge will spur colleges to wring more efficiencies from their operations or become more creative in delivering services more cheaply — although they already should be doing that in the face of state funding cuts and caps on how much they can increase tuition.

Any progress in bending the college cost curve downward is appreciated. Just don’t expect a revolution in tuition.

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